Blowing Rock Woodworks Unveils New and Improved Website for its Customers

Published Wednesday, July 25, 2018 at 4:58 pm

By Nathan Ham

In case you haven’t heard, Blowing Rock Woodworks has a brand new website showing off some of the highest quality wood pieces you’ll find in the High Country.

“We had a basic, rudimentary website where you could order online, but we wanted to have more things available with better photos and videos. What we had was sort of out of date,” said Nick Williams, who handles the marketing and sales for Blowing Rock Woodworks. “So we went in this direction to create something new and more appealing to the eye. The core of it was to get better photos and videos online and for people shopping online to get a better sense of what they’re ordering on the website.”

Blowing Rock Woodworks has come a long way in six years. The business started in 2012 with John Northrup working in his garage making cutting boards and small wooden pieces. After selling a couple of live edge tables, the demand started to grow for more and more of these larger woodwork projects.

All of the work is done in Deep Gap with some of the finer pieces of wood put on display at the shop’s storefront on Aho Road in Blowing Rock.

“We get giant pieces of wood in and tailor them to what we think will sell the best, things like dining room tables, coffee tables, end tables and benches,” Williams said. “We have a few tables in our store and a lot of really neat stuff. If customers don’t see what they want here, we can then point them to our website.”

Williams says that they source their wood from West Penn Hardwoods in Hickory.

“Our locally sourced American Walnut wood normally comes from Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia. We’ll get a lot of exotic stuff too from Mexico, Brazil and Costa Rica,” Williams added.

With the unveiling of the new website also comes a new way of how Blowing Rock Woodworks has been handling its workload.

“We realized that instead of taking so many inquiries on what people want, how about we just build things nonstop and build a lot of really beautiful pieces,” said Williams. “If you build it, people will buy it. If someone comes to our showroom and can touch it, feel it and see it, they just buy it then.”

A lot of the woodwork projects that used to take up to a month to complete now take roughly half that amount of time with most projects taking about two weeks to complete, according to Williams.

Williams hopes that having a lot of items already built will alleviate some of the frustrations of trying to build a product solely based on someone else’s idea.

“It’s really hard to align a finished product with someone’s vision,” he said. “Hopefully customers will like what we build and they can see it in the showroom or in photos and videos. You get to see it as it is instead of what you think it might be.”

Overall, Williams hopes that the new direction that Blowing Rock Woodworks has taken will help the business continue to grow without scaring off any customers that like their one-of-a-kind pieces of wood.